The Beauty of Software

This year's Turing lecture was given by IBM fellow Grady Booch. The focus of his speech was on software and the way it affects our lives - under the title 'The promise, the limits, the beauty of software.' Here are some major points as summarised by the e-BCS newsletter.

Booch quoted Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer of C++, as saying that civilisation runs on software and that it effects how we govern, communicate, work, eat, sleep and play. Booch added to this that because of our reliance on software, its designers are amongst the world's most important people. Software can amplify human intelligence, but not replace human judgement or knowledge. He also feels that there's a significant beauty within software engineering and that software intense systems are perhaps the most intellectually complex things created by humans and that software can also be moral and ethical.

Booch also expressed his concerns for the retention of digital data and old software. 'Email and other software can increase the velocity of communication but threatens the preservation of history due to the state of our digital archives.' and 'Behind the preservation of classic software there is a need to have a museum of software, not just of old PCs but the software that ran on them. There is a need to establish the source code for Microsoft within this museum for future generations.'

The whole text is at - http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.10428